How Settlements Led the Way to a State
By Roger Harrison, Arab News, June 20, 2003
This is the second of a three-part series on Jewish settlements in Jerusalem and Palestine. -- For over a century and a half, they have been built and used as a symbol of the Jewish presence in Palestine. Initially, they coexisted alongside Arab inhabitants and became part of the urban and social structure. After the foundation of Israel as a state in 1948, there was a sea-change in settlement policy. The state saw it as necessary that the Arab inhabitants of Palestine and the international community saw Israel as “a Jewish fact.” This series reviews the development of settlement policy from a situation of peaceful coexistence as a tool for occupation of Arab lands and its subsequent use as the justification for military action. “We must invent dangers and to do this, it (the state) must adopt the method of provocation and revenge.... Above all, let us hope for a war with the Arab countries so that we may finally get rid of our troubles and acquire our space” — Moshe Dayan May 1955, quoted by Moshe Sharrett, ex-foreign minister and acting prime minister at the time of the Qibya massacre. History isn’t necessarily what happened. It is what is written, and usually by the winners. It is presented to the public within a framework of accepted truths and underlying dogma. In a totalitarian state, this is obvious. It becomes less obvious and more intriguing when the state professes liberal and open attitudes. The acceptable views of history from an apparently liberal state’s perspective is maintained by a willingness of academics and press to close ranks and refuse to submit to critical analysis when their version of the truth is questioned. The occasional critical departure from the articles of faith they support is tolerated as long as it is confined to a narrow stratum of society that they can readily define as ‘uninformed’ or ‘naive.’ Such departures may actually be useful insofar as they can be used as examples of the mainstream’s fabled tolerance and liberal attitude to dissent. Such is the case with the United States and its relationship with Israel where ironically, institutionalized discrimination against Jews is more than it is against almost any other group.

Iran in the Process of Gradual Change
By Amir Taheri, Arab News, June 20, 2003 
For the past 10 days, thousands of students have been protesting against the regime in Iran. Started in Tehran University, the movement has spread to campuses in other major cities. It has also attracted some middle class support while industrial workers in a number of cities have staged symbolic walkouts in solidarity. This is not the first time that Iranian students rise against the Islamist system. Their first revolt came in 1979, soon after the late Ayatollah Khomeini seized power. He reacted by closing all universities for two years. The latest series of campus revolts, began in 1998, has continued unabated since. Is Iran on the verge of a “second revolution” or civil war as some commentators suggest? The answer is: No. The reason is that a consensus may yet emerge inside Iran for constitutional change through a referendum. The idea is to remove two articles of the constitution and amend six others, thus separating the mosque from the state. Under the proposals the position of “supreme guide”, currently held by Ali Khamenei will be abolished, allowing Iran to become a “normal” republic with a president and Parliament elected by and accountable to the people. Today, hardly anyone even within the establishment is prepared to defend the principle of “Velayat-e-Faqih” under which a mulla, named the supreme guide, is regarded as the embodiment of divine will on earth and given absolute powers in the name of his infallibility. The establishment is no longer strong enough to crush its opponents as it routinely did throughout the 1980 and 1990s. The armed and police forces have made it clear they would not shoot anti-regime demonstrators. And the regime’s hired thugs, known as Hizbullah, are not numerous enough, and confident enough to, beat opponents and disperse demonstrations. The students’ demand for constitutional change seems to have some support within the establishment. Over two-thirds of the members of the Islamic Majlis (parliament) have published an open letter to Khamenei, to endorse the call for the separation of mosque and state. Another open letter, signed by 250 intellectuals with impeccable Khomeinist credentials, goes further by calling for the establishment of a Western-style democratic system.

The Hazards of Being a Student in the States
By Raid Qusti, Arab News, June 20, 2003
The United States consul general in Jeddah recently said in this newspaper that now was the time to apply for a US visa for new or renewing Saudi students as it “may take a couple of months.” She made it look like a matter of simple routine, and as though Saudi students were welcome in the US and it was only a matter of time before they received their visa. She must be joking. What Saudi in his right mind would think about studying in the United States these days? The obstacles start with the application process. The wait is not, as she noted, “a couple of months.” Arab News has learned that some Saudi students who were lucky to get a visa waited over six months. Some of them were in the United States and came back to renew their status. In the meantime they had rented accommodation there with all their belongings inside. Their landlords threw out their property and took them to court in absentia and ruined their “credit history”. They also had their study plans completely destroyed. One unlucky student who fell in this predicament was Moayad Qusti. “My credit history is ruined and I only had one semester left,” he told Arab News. But he was one of the lucky ones. Countless others had their application refused while they were writing their dissertation. Their PhD program and years of study went down the drain. Arab News came across one unfortunate student who was studying in Pittsburgh. “They refused me a visa to return and finish my thesis. I have now applied to study in the UK, but I have to start the PhD program all over again. I lost three years of my life.” Others had their whole careers and life plans ruined because their application was rejected outright. Ask Saudi Aramco. Recently over 100 of its trainee applicants were rejected (mostly engineers) and they had to send them to Europe for training instead.

A Road Map for the Jewish People
By Loolwa Khazzoom, AlterNet/Pacific News Service, June 18, 2003
Jews across the globe worry whether the road map to peace with Palestinians is dead, or can be salvaged. To me it is critical that Jews and Arabs find a path to peace. But as an Israeli Jew with roots in Iraq, I'm disturbed when the Jewish world continuously emphasizes building relationships between Jews and non-Jews while it ignores a deep diversity issue among our own. We Mizrahim, 900,000 Middle Eastern and North African Jewish refugees, were forced to flee from our homes about 50 years ago. Arab states confiscated and nationalized billions of dollars worth of our property, yet Jewish leaders have made barely a peep of protest. We are hardly invisible: We are half Israel's population. When Mizrahim came to Israel, everything we offered – thousands of years of Jewish history, culture, religious traditions, an intellectual class, and daily experience – was devalued. Viewed as primitive and barbaric, we were marginalized and treated as if destined to fail – an attitude that proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Today, Mizrahim make up the overwhelming majority of Jews in Israeli slums and prisons. When that which is disdained in us is exactly the Middle Eastern and North African culture we share with our Arab neighbors, and when Jew-on-Jew racism against Mizrahim has gone unaddressed for five decades, how can Jewish-Arab bridge building have any integrity or expectations of success? The only way out of the Mizrahi spiral downward was to run as fast and as far as possible from our native Middle Eastern and North African ways. There are many successful Mizrahim in Israel, but the price has been dissociation from our roots and shame about our heritage. Today, Ethiopian Israelis are going through the same bleaching process, but worse. Their very Jewish identity was officially denied upon entry into Israel, and scores were forced to convert to Judaism (as if they were not already Jews), including the kes – the equivalent of rabbis in the community. More humiliation came through the separation of families – some family members accepted as Jews, others not; some brought to Israel, others left to rot in Addis Ababa.

What Did He Know and When Did He Know It?
By Robert Scheer, AlterNet, June 18, 2003
What did the president know and when did he know it? The answer to that question forced the resignation of Richard Nixon as he was about to be impeached. Now, with President Bush facing that same question, congressional Republicans have circled the wagons to prevent a public hearing on whether intelligence was distorted by the White House to convince us of the need for war. Why? Because public hearings could lead to public demands for impeachment. Sound far-fetched? Not when you consider the gravity of the charge. "To put it bluntly," former Nixon White House counsel John Dean wrote on the legal Web site FindLaw on June 6, "if Bush has taken Congress and the nation into war based on bogus information, he is cooked. Manipulation or deliberate misuse of national security intelligence data, if proven, could be 'a high crime' under the Constitution's impeachment clause. It would also be a violation of federal criminal law, including the broad federal anti-conspiracy statute, which renders it a felony 'to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.'." Of course, intelligence data is often open to interpretation, and some political distortion is probably inevitable. Consider, however, just one of the recent revelations about how Iraq weapons intelligence was handled by the Bush administration and you'll start to see a disturbing pattern of cynical mendacity. Call it the "Case of the Phantom Uranium." It starts with a document, later exposed by United Nations inspectors as a crude forgery, that was sold by an African diplomat to Italian intelligence, which passed it to the British. It seemed to implicate Saddam Hussein in an attempt to buy uranium from Africa. This apparently proved too juicy a tidbit for the hawks in the Bush administration to resist. They knew that the specter of Iraqi nukes – which U.N. inspectors would establish as baseless – would scare Americans much more than talk of mustard gas, and scaring Americans is this administration's M.O.

The right to resist
By Seumas Milne, The Guardian, June 19, 2003
Armed opposition to the occupation of Iraq will continue until the US and Britain withdraw -- It would have been hard to predict in advance that the US and British occupation of Iraq could go so spectacularly wrong so quickly. The words of the historian Tacitus about the Roman invasion of Scotland in the first century AD might just as well have been written about our latter-day Rome's latest imperial adventure: "They create a wasteland and they call it peace." More than two months after the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraq is sinking deeper into chaos and insecurity, as US forces lash out at the Iraqi resistance, which is now killing an average of one American soldier a day. Another was shot dead in Baghdad yesterday, while US troops killed more protesters - as they have repeatedly done since the massacres of demonstrators in Mosul and Falluja in April. The British minister in charge of reconstruction in occupied Iraq, Baroness Amos, had to admit yesterday that she is unable to visit the country because of the risk of guerilla attack, while the British commander, Major General Freddie Viggers, conceded that British troops may now be in Iraq for up to four years because of the growing insurgency. In Britain, the unravelling of what US deputy secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, called the "bureaucratic" pretext for war - the supposed threat from Iraqi chemical and biological weapons - has created the most serious political crisis for Tony Blair's government in six years and removed the last vestige of possible legality from the aggression. With no sign of any such weapons on the ground in Iraq, intelligence leaks and the withering accounts of former cabinet ministers Clare Short and Robin Cook have stripped bare the ultimate New Labour spin operation. Polls show most British people are now convinced the government deliberately exaggerated the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to bounce public and parliament into war. Not surprisingly, attitudes to the conflict itself are also beginning to turn.

How to stop Hamas: First, end the occupation
By Sara Roy, Daily Star, June 20, 2003
The “road map” that President George W. Bush is committed to will not end the cycle of violence between Palestinians and Israelis. Like the Oslo process before it, the road map will fail for one fundamental reason: the continuation of Israel’s ongoing and brutal occupation of the Palestinian people. It is impossible to stop the violence if the primary condition that produces it ­ the occupation and the oppressive policies that define it ­ remain unchanged, intact and in force. In fact, in response to the December 2002 draft of the road map, the Israeli government stated: “The purpose of the road map should be an end to the conflict rather than an end to the occupation.” During the Oslo period (1993-2000), the occupation was not only maintained, it was strengthened. Because of this, Palestinians saw the real decline of their economy across all sectors, accelerated by Israel’s confiscation of at least 40,000 more acres of Arab land, much of it viable agricultural land worth over $1 billion. During this time, the settler population nearly doubled, from 110,000 to 200,000 people, and, as settlements mushroomed, 250 miles of bypass roads were built on confiscated Palestinian land to connect Israeli settlements and bypass and isolate Palestinian localities. The fragmentation and cantonization of the West Bank and Gaza transformed the West Bank into a series of disconnected, noncontiguous territorial enclaves with movement totally controlled by the Israeli military. Economic sieges known as “closure,” resulted in unprecedented levels of unemployment, impoverishment, and child labor. Since the Al-Aqsa uprising, the already acute conditions in the Occupied Territories worsened rapidly. In the almost three years since the uprising began, the restrictions of occupation have grown more severe. At least 50 percent of Palestinians are now unemployed (compared with an average of 11 percent before 2000), and the Palestinian private sector, the engine of economic growth, has been largely destroyed. Palestinian infrastructure has also been severely damaged or destroyed by the Israeli Army, with losses reaching up to $800 million. Perhaps most alarming is that between 60-70 percent of Palestinians now live in poverty (up from 21 percent in 2000), and almost 25 percent of children under 5 suffer acute or chronic malnutrition ­ rates comparable to the Congo.

Who Are the Palestinian Refugees?
By MIFTAH, Palestine Chronicle, June 20, 2003
"Who are the Palestinian refugees? How did the Palestinian refugee problem arise? How did Israel expel Palestinians from their land? How many Palestinian refugees are there today? Is there a durable solution? .." -- Palestinian refugees are the indigenous Arab inhabitants of historic Palestine, which today is comprised of Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza. Israel forcibly and illegally expelled the larger part of the Palestinian population from its land when the state of Israel was established in 1948, and continued this during the 1967 Israeli Arab wars. Palestinian refugees are categorized into three main groups: Palestinian refugees displaced in 1948 outside the areas of historic Palestine that became the state of Israel, internally displaced Palestinians who remained within the areas that became the state of Israel and Palestinian refugees displaced for the first time in the 1967 war from the West Bank and Gaza. For the past 55 years and counting, Palestinian refugees have been denied their right of return to their ancestral villages and homes. How did the Palestinian refugee problem arise? The Palestinian refugee problem arose not from a conflict in which, as claimed, the Zionist forces overcame overwhelming odds against the Arab armies and the Palestinian population voluntarily left, but from a systematic policy of ethnic cleansing. The results of which are apparent in the Palestinian refugee camps across the Arab world and in the Palestinian Diaspora. The policies, to a lesser extent, continue to this day in Jerusalem and across the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Zionist Policy sought to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, a region already populated with a history stretching back thousand of years. The characterization of a land without a people for a people without a land created the myth of an empty waiting Palestine. Nothing could be further from the truth and this was evidenced in the atrocities of the 1948 War. Initially, Zionist policy was directed towards winning the acceptance of the British and other colonial powers.  How did Israel expel Palestinians from their land? Jewish underground terrorist groups such as Haganah, Irgun and Stern had the mission to terrorize the Palestinian street, destroy villages and slaughter entire Palestinian families. 34 massacres were committed within a few months: Al-Abbasiyya, Beit Daras, Bir Al-Saba', Al-Kabri, Haifa, Qisarya… These attacks aimed to annihilate the entire Palestinian territory and population (so-called Plan D), 50% of the Palestinian villages were destroyed in 1948 and many cities were cleared from its Palestinian population: Aker, Bir Al-Saba', Bisan, Al-Lod, Al-Majdal, Nazareth, Haifa, Tiberias, Jaffa, West-Jerusalem…

Road map to perpetuating the status quo
By Meron Benvenisti, Haaretz, June 20, 2003
"..the only choice left is between a regime of a Jewish minority over an Arab majority without civil rights, or a multi-cultural governmental framework, usually referred to as a "binational state." The road map and the rest of the plans based on "separation" are simply dreams perpetuating the status quo."  -- The rude awakening from the illusion of the wings of history flapping over the Aqaba summit and its launch of the road map was particularly traumatic, and all those who waxed poetic about the new dawn would now prefer not to be reminded of their historiosophic enthrallment. Opportunities missed, whether maliciously or stupidly, and festive occasions that turn into fiascoes, are among the characteristics of the Israel-Arab dispute and the road map won't be the last. But in all its wiliness, history summons occasions that have a seemingly self-evident significance, but in retrospect they signal contradictory and opposite processes. From that perspective, the launch of the road map is, indeed, an unusual historic occasion: Seemingly, the "division of the Holy Land" was announced but, in effect, it brings the principle of the connection between territory and ethnic identity (on which the partition principle is based) to its absurd limits. Seemingly, the principle of "two states for two peoples" and the principle of national sovereignty won. But, in effect, what's being proposed is a regime of ethnic cantons inside a geopolitical unit comparable to the old south Africa, in which the connection between land and nationalism is only safeguarded for the dominant Jewish nationality. It's impossible to disconnect the road map, its formulas and definitions, from the political and military reality that exists in the occupied territories, and which it seemingly seeks to change. This reality has two symbols: the outposts and the checkpoints. Both are meant to paint the open areas of the West Bank in Jewish colors.....The "state" that will be established will be of a totally new sort: its "sovereignty" will be scattered, lacking any physical infrastructure, without any direct connection to the outside world, and limited to the height of it residential buildings and the depth of its graves. The airspace and the water resources will remain under Israeli sovereignty. Helicopter patrols, control over the electromagnetic dimension, the hands on the water pumps and the electricity switches, passes to enter and leave, goods passed "back to back" - it will all receive the approval of the road map inspectors. Indeed, this is a unique Israeli-American contribution to political science, and to the definition of national sovereignty and the division of the Holy Land, for which Ariel Sharon has won high praise from President Bush "for his leadership and commitment to build a better future for the Palestinians." And it's all to come about, of course, on the condition that the Palestinians appreciate the generosity and pay for it accordingly.